Repatriating BC-raised IMGs

Issue: BCMJ, vol. 51, No. 8, October 2009, Page 358 News

The BC Initiative to Repatriate BC-raised IMGs is calling on all BC-raised medical students studying abroad, BC-raised international medical graduates (IMGs), and their parents to join in a campaign to immediately change the current provincial requirements facing BC-raised IMGs wishing to obtain postgraduate residency positions in BC and other parts of Canada. 

In addition to passing the Medical Council of Canada Evaluating Examination, BC-raised IMGs must also: 
• Participate in a 3-month superfluous training process at St Paul’s Hospital from March to June during which time these students must be overseas to pass final exams. This results in a 1-year delay in these students continuing their residency. 
• Be limited to the 6 specialty and 12 family medicine programs available through the BC-IMG program.
• Be forced into signing a return-of-service contract, having already funded their own medical studies abroad.

The initiative aims to have BC join other provinces, such as Manitoba and Quebec, in allowing Canadian-raised IMGs to be treated as Canadian-trained students in order to meet present and future medical service demands. For complete details of the campaign see bcma.org/initiative-repatriate-bcraised-international-medical-graduates-imgs.

. Repatriating BC-raised IMGs . BCMJ, Vol. 51, No. 8, October, 2009, Page(s) 358 - News.


Above is the information needed to cite this article in your paper or presentation. The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) recommends the following citation style, which is the now nearly universally accepted citation style for scientific papers:
Halpern SD, Ubel PA, Caplan AL, Marion DW, Palmer AM, Schiding JK, et al. Solid-organ transplantation in HIV-infected patients. N Engl J Med. 2002;347:284-7.

About the ICMJE and citation styles

The ICMJE is small group of editors of general medical journals who first met informally in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1978 to establish guidelines for the format of manuscripts submitted to their journals. The group became known as the Vancouver Group. Its requirements for manuscripts, including formats for bibliographic references developed by the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), were first published in 1979. The Vancouver Group expanded and evolved into the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), which meets annually. The ICMJE created the Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals to help authors and editors create and distribute accurate, clear, easily accessible reports of biomedical studies.

An alternate version of ICMJE style is to additionally list the month an issue number, but since most journals use continuous pagination, the shorter form provides sufficient information to locate the reference. The NLM now lists all authors.

BCMJ standard citation style is a slight modification of the ICMJE/NLM style, as follows:

  • Only the first three authors are listed, followed by "et al."
  • There is no period after the journal name.
  • Page numbers are not abbreviated.


For more information on the ICMJE Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals, visit www.icmje.org

BCMJ Guidelines for Authors

Leave a Reply